Thought for food: Nutritional information and educational disparities in diet

Publication

Publication

Journal of Human Capital
,
Volume 11
-
Issue 4
p. 508-
522

Higher-educated individuals are healthier and live longer than their lowereducated peers. One reason is that lower-educated individuals tend to consume lower-quality diets, but it is not fully understood why they do so. We designed a discrete-choice experiment to investigate how provision of nutritional information affects dietary choices of lower- and higher-educated individuals. We find that nutritional knowledge is responsible for a large part of the disparity in dietary choices. However, even when faced with the most explicit nutritional information, lower-educated individuals still state choices that suggest a lower value for negative health consequences.